Few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on our company’s event. The visitors were both experienced offshorers and people planning to offshore their software development. One of the questions that arose was ‘what are the pitfalls in offshoring’. While I could write a book about this (and I actually did), I have a top three:
Are companies moving IT jobs back to their home country? Is offshoring on the reverse? I often hear people say that it’s the case. It often sounds like ‘hard facts’, so I decided to do a small research.
The first thing I found is that there is no research. There is hardly any research about the countries people offshore or nearshore to (at least from the Netherlands I couldn’t find any data). There is also no research about the net effect of jobs moving abroad versus jobs ‘coming back’. Maybe a wake up call to some researchers?
We recently launched our new eBook about offshoring and nearshoring :
‘How to Organize Offshore and Nearshore Collaboration’
The main questions came up when managing teams that are geographically distributed are:- How do you organize a remote collaboration? What process should you introduce? How do you communicate your requirements? How do you ensure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing? Nowadays, the technological infrastructure is in place and there are many companies working with globally distributed teams. At the same time, a lot of people look for a proven way to organize remote work. In this eBook, nine practitioners from different parts of the world and from different organizations share best practices based on their experiences.
The past few years, the ecommerce market is booming all over Europe. And consumers plan to shop online even more. Deutsche Post published a research last week, which shows that by 2025, ecommerce share on overall trade in developed countries, …
The past months, I have interviewed some 35 candidates for a marketing and sales role in our company. Because I want to save time, I always do the first screening through Skype. I believe this is a better medium than only phone, since you can see the candidate. So I have a list of questions that I go through in maximum 30 minutes to assure that there is at least a basis.
Agile retrospectives are a great way to continuously improve your way of working. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. An overview of things that you can use to get value out of your retrospectives.
Together with Luis Gonçalves I have written the pocket book on Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives which can be downloaded from InfoQ and Leanpub. This book is based on our blog posts on retrospectives (see Luis blogs on retrospectives and Ben’s blogs on retrospectives). We value your feedback, feel free to contact me and let me know what you think of this?
If you have a look at our facebook cover picture, you might already imagine it. Being a Global IT Staffing Company, this does not only mean that we do business on an international level. For us, operating in and between …
Do your teams want to know how agile they are? And what could be the possible next steps for them to become more agile and lean? In an open space session about Agile Self-Assessments organized by nlScrum we discussed why self-assessments matter and how teams can self-assess their agility to become better in what they do.
Two months back, I visited the lean startup conference in San Francisco. One of the talks that I loved was with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. He built wordpress step by step in the past years. Today, he has …
The past weeks I often get questions about Ukraine from people. They wonder whether we notice anything of the unrest in Ukraine and whether it affects the work our nearshore teams do.
From my perspective, it’s simple: as long as nobody barricades our office or cuts the internet or power lines, business can go on. Our developers love their work and as long as they can do their work, they will. On the longer term, a change in government might affect laws, which may have an impact on the way nearshoring is organized. But the past years, Ukrainian government has discussed changing tax laws and only a very small new tax was added last year. So I am not worried about our office in Kiev and Odessa.
We recently launched our new ebook about offshoring and nearshoring: ‘How to prepare for managing a remote team?’ We found that many people skip some very important steps when they move work offshore. Most companies spend a lot of time on country and supplier selection and once that’s fixed, they get going. Many problems in communication and collaboration can be prevented, by focussing on some essential steps before ‘doing it’.
Where do you start when you plan to move work halfway across the globe, to a country and culture you don’t know, several time zones away? What can you do to prepare your company and your people to make offshoring a success? What have other people done in order to prepare for their offshore journey? Typical questions that come up while preparing, are:
Any (company/individual) Project Manager cannot execute a project to meet three goals at once like “High speed-Low cost-Best Quality”! Any comments?